This week, read true stories, romanticized histories and only slightly embarrassing memories of the objects that made school what it was.

A few months ago, I saw a heading in the Times Literary Supplement: “Is Reading Good for You?” A lifelong print addict, I mentally answered, “Of course!” But how would I prove it? And if it improves us, how does that work?

An experiment in cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto attempted to answer that question. Researchers gathered two groups of readers, one to read a short story, the other to read a summary of the same story, written like a factual account. The two groups would give their reactions.

The researchers chose The Lady with the Dog, a much-loved story by Anton Chekhov. A married man, Dmitri, sees a woman named Anna on the seafront in Yalta, decides to seduce her and in the end has an affair with her. Anna fears Dmitri considers her “common” and Dmitri soon realizes that he’s living two lives, one open and the other secret. The relationship has pleased neither character.

Those who read the report-like version found it merely interesting. The response from those who read the fiction was different. A researcher noted that “Chekhov’s story seemed to get people to start thinking about their personalities, about themselves, in new ways.” The results ran in the New York Times under the heading, “How Reading Transforms Us.”

That kind of short story, like many novels, can arouse self-scrutiny in readers. Whether they like it or not, their thoughts may turn inward. They place themselves in the narrative, and then go on to imagine the backstories of the characters and what happens to them later. Fiction always leaves something out, sometimes a great deal. If we want to know the rest, we must imagine it, and in the course of imagining it we may reveal ourself.

The idea that literature expands our capacity for empathy works in theory, but not if we are personally armoured against that kind of knowledge

Rick Rylance’s recent book, Literature and the Public Good, published by the Oxford University Press, makes that argument clear: reading expands our capacity for empathy and empathy is good for society. It broadens our awareness of realities beyond our own. This perspective reminded me of Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, the first book I read by an African about Africa (it appeared in 1958). An eloquent account of imperialism in Nigeria, it moved me some distance toward an understanding ofthe many people, rich in feeling, who may never experience freedom as I do.

The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, recently discussing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wrote that a philosopher will ask how the identity of the self can be preserved amid the ceaseless flux of real and imagined experience. Lewis Carroll lets Alice experience that confusion. She encounters a blue caterpillar, who is sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah. He asks Alice, “Who are you?” She answers: “I – I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up but I think I must have changed several times since that.” Alice, like Carroll’s readers, must piece together an identity, bit by bit.

Novels, while helping us learn who were are, can be a guide to appropriateness. They teach us manners. When we are young and desperate to be accepted, they may tell us which forms of identity are permitted within a given social fabric – and, sometimes, which are not.

The idea that literature expands our capacity for empathy works in theory, but not if we are personally armoured against that kind of knowledge. Penny Newell, an English critic, rightly insists that when we praise reading for improving us, we should also consider what else it can do.

Newell’s examination of the dual effects of reading is perhaps best considered through the case of Richard Spencer, currently infamous for his part in the white nationalist Charlottesville Weekend. In 2001, Spencer received a B.A. with High Distinction in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia. In 2003, he obtained an M.A. in the humanities from the University of Chicago. From 2005 to 2007, he was a doctoral student at Duke University, studying modern European intellectual history.

In those years, Spencer must have read a fair-sized library of books. He must have been instructed, indirectly but often, to open his heart to strangers. Instead, he exercised his constitutional right to free speech and came down firmly on the other side, untouched by the good-hearted side of literature.

Adolescents can be particularly affected by the right book. In 1945, I was 13 when I read Black Boy, the memoirs of Richard Wright. He grew up in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. Hungry and fearful, he turned cold, suspicious and self-pitying. Doing a spoken book review to my Grade 9 class, I read aloud a short passage about his spiteful treatment by whites. Before I finished, tears began streaming down my face.

That’s a book I’ve never forgotten, a book that has never stopped determining my feelings about race.